Microsoft's Xbox division head spoke at a gaming conference and discussed the …

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J Allard, who heads Microsoft's Xbox game division and is the Chief Architect of the XNA gaming software development program, spoke yesterday at the Entertainment Gathering 2006 conference in Los Angeles, California.

Allard's speech highlighted the biggest problem facing game content creators today: the runaway costs of development. With the release of the next generation of console hardware such as the Xbox 360, game developers are finding that the cost of creating high-quality, high-resolution models and art is increasing with no end in sight. Clearly a solution is needed, and Allard's vision is to harness the creative power of the players themselves.

Allard told a story of meeting a 12- or 13-year-old inner-city child last year and introducing him to a basketball game on the new Xbox 360. Instead of spending hours dunking or trash-talking with his friends, the boy spent two hours creating a pair of sneakers, saying that was what he wanted to do when he grew up.

The idea of players assisting in developing content dates back to the earliest days of text-based multi-user dungeons, or MUDs. Players would start out simply exploring the online world, but as they advanced in power they could become "wizards" with the ability to create new items, rooms, and quests for other players. This was a natural extension of the tabletop games of Dungeons and Dragons that were the creative inspiration for many early computer adventures. Later roleplaying games, such as Bioware's 2002 release Neverwinter Nights, came with an easy to use level editor that allowed players to create their own worlds and even assume the role of the Dungeon Master, guiding their friends along an adventure they created. Hundreds of player-created modules are available at Bioware's web site, some even rivaling the original game for complexity and compelling storytelling.

Also speaking at the conference was Sim City creator Wil Wright, who discussed his new game, Spore. In Spore, the player guides a single-celled animal through the evolutionary process until the creature and its civilization are ready for space flight. When the player flies to other planets, they turn out to be worlds that other players have created and the game automatically downloads over the Internet. This creates a large, living universe without the developer having to design a single planet. J Allard believes that kind of automatic world-generation could become a model for more conventional games as well:

"If only 1 percent of our audience that plays Halo helped construct the world around Halo, it would be more human beings than work at Microsoft corporation," Allard said. "That's how much human energy we could harness in this medium."

Can players really become the new game designers? Some may dismiss the notion, looking back at how cheap desktop video editing was supposed to turn us all into Spielbergs, but ended up with the proliferation of more boring home movies. Like it or not, there is no substitute for talented designers, and people with any skill at the job usually find themselves working in the industry. However, even though player input is not a substitute for game design, the example of Spore shows that it can greatly assist in it.

Look for a more in-depth article covering both Allard and Wright's talk, written by our own Ryan Paul, coming soon to the front page of Ars Technica!